Monday, 30 July 2012

With 5.3 version, NextReports will bring a very needed feature: possibility to insert a report inside another report. In the same way a chart is inserted inside a report, now a new action is available allowing to add a report. As for charts, all parameters from parent report are passed to child report if child has some identically with parent's ones.

If the child report is inserted inside detail band, to make it acting as a sub-report, it has to meet a simple convention condition. For any child report parameter, if user wants the parameter to have a record-dependent value, the column from parent report (which has to pass the value to sub-report parameter value) must have an alias with the same name as the sub-report parameter name.

Besides a relation of report/sub-report, a parent report can contain just a simple set of children reports allowing to have more queries inside a report. To make this possible, the children reports can be inserted in header or footer bands.

To make work with children charts and reports easier, NextReports Designer will allow to edit children directly from parent report. When we will Edit a chart or a report, designer will open the child and user can do any changes he wants. After the child report/chart is edited, user will return to the parent report through a special action:

Using this kind of navigation (edit inner report/chart - back to parent), user can go inside & outside to an infinite number of children reports.

Monday, 23 July 2012

NextReports dashboards can contain table widgets, which basically represent grid reports created with the designer.

Forthcoming version of NextReports will take into account the layout of the report making table widgets to contain corresponding style. This means colors, font style, padding and alignment will be visible. Some properties like font family, font size and borders are not taken into account, being irrelevant.

A major benefit of using styles for table widgets is interpreting formatting conditions (with relevant properties) for cells and rows. Such example can look like :